Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 23rd Sep 2007 11:02 UTC, submitted by irbis
Ian Murdock took the stage in one of the small rooms at the Moscone Center West to talk about the OpenSolaris Binary Distribution that is currently known as Project Indiana. We captured all of the slides Ian had shown, and while most of the information he shared was just reiterated from his past talks, there was some interesting details worth sharing. Among the advantages of Project Indiana is that it will use Sun's ZFS as the default file-system, and Project Indiana will be taking full advantage of its abilities to create snapshots and perform rollbacks if something with the system's software goes wrong. With Sun's past work with the GNOME project, GNOME will be the desktop environment in Project Indiana said Ian Murdock.
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Member since:2005-07-07
The C++ ABI is not standard and it is far from be stable (including between two versions of the same C++ compiler)..
I've seen this as well, even from Sun engineers. Seems their C++ compiler can't keep stable ABI either, at least not through a Solaris release cycle.
Probably their C++ team is a lot smaller than any other engineering unit and therefore can't keep the same stability as others.
...so, creating some library with SUNWpro C++ compiler will not be useful for an application written with g++.
I'd say this is more an excuse than an argument.
Given a platform there is always one compiler defining "the standard" and since we are talking about Solaris here, it is Sun's own one.
If g++ is incompatible, bad luck.
...as far as I know, Qt does not support SUNWPro C++ compiler...
Extremely unlikely, unless Sun has a couple of totally different C++ compilers, because it supports the one from Sun we are using on Solaris/SPARC every day when doing nightly builds.
Sometimes generates loads of warning for our code, all correct though
One of the prime advantages when doing mulitplatform software.
...Qt, the KDE base library, has a dual license: GPL for open source applications and a commercial license for proprietary applications...
Licence royalties haven't kept them from shipping Motif and hasn't kept hunderts of companies from licencing Qt so far.
Not a problem though, since Solaris is also X11 based, companies can licence the toolkit they want to use instead of relying on what is shipped by the OSV.
Edit: fixed quoting
Edited 2007-09-23 18:15
Member since:2005-07-06
I've seen this as well, even from Sun engineers. Seems their C++ compiler can't keep stable ABI either, at least not through a Solaris release cycle.
No, it's actually the other way around. Sun's C++ ABI hasn't changed in many years. It's the gcc ABI that keeps changing.
Extremely unlikely, unless Sun has a couple of totally different C++ compilers, because it supports the one from Sun we are using on Solaris/SPARC every day when doing nightly builds.
Yep, the original statement was wrong. You can compile Qt with Sun Studio (though you need RogueWave too with the latest versions).
Licence royalties haven't kept them from shipping Motif and hasn't kept hunderts of companies from licencing Qt so far.
Which is irrelevant because that's what the UNIX consortium started with. However, Sun decided that wasn't an acceptable choice going forward and that is why they are phasing out CDE in favour of GNOME.
Member since:2007-01-17
I've seen this as well, even from Sun engineers. Seems their C++ compiler can't keep stable ABI either, at least not through a Solaris release cycle.
Sun's C++ compiler is not included with Solaris, has it's own release cycle, and has maintained a stable ABI for about a decade now. It also used to cost $1500, so many people preferred gcc/g++. Now it's free, but OpenSolaris has tried to avoid locking in one compiler over another.
Licence royalties haven't kept them from shipping Motif
Sun is a co-owner of Motif, and neither Sun nor Sun's customers pay license royalties for Motif on Solaris.
Not a problem though, since Solaris is also X11 based, companies can licence the toolkit they want to use instead of relying on what is shipped by the OSV.
Absolutely. Sun can't bundle every possible bit of software in the OS - that's what ISV's are for.
Member since:2005-07-13
They forgot to mention point number 4. The one where they explain that endorsing a third-party cross-platform framework designed for effective write-once/compile-anywhere development would sort of conflict with the original java strategy. 
Gnome made sense originally because it lacked a real development framework, and I remember how the whole "Java Desktop" thing was supposed to be about a java desktop framework for app development, or something to that effect. Never took off, and then the primates came along and muddied the waters as well with their attempt to make mono the de facto development framework.
It's also worth mentioning, in fairness, that one of the Sun offices in Europe has been supporting some of the local KDE devs working on KDE4/Solaris, and have even provided hardware for test builds etc.
Member since:
2006-05-09
I ask this issue in an OpenSolaris mailing list some time before and someone replied me answering my questions. Basically, Solaris will not support KDE as its desktop environment because three things:
1. The C ABI is standard, so, any library compiled with any C compiler can be used by any application compiled with another C compiler (this is very important, because Sun pushes SUNWpro C compiler but they want to provide compatibility with the GNU C compiler also.
The C++ ABI is not standard and it is far from be stable (including between two versions of the same C++ compiler), so, creating some library with SUNWpro C++ compiler will not be useful for an application written with g++. This is a very critical problem because KDE is written in C++; as far as I know, Qt does not support SUNWPro C++ compiler and in order to provide library usability on KDE, they should build several versions of the same library, compiled with several compilers: impractical.
2. GTK+, the GNOME base library, has a LGPL license; meanwhile, Qt, the KDE base library, has a dual license: GPL for open source applications and a commercial license for proprietary applications. If Solaris would support officially KDE, the developers that want to write some commercial applications for KDE, should buy the Qt library; in the other extreme, nothing stops them from writing commercial applications using GTK+.
3. Solaris has invested a lot of resources in the GNOME accessibility framework, so, GNOME fully implements an accessibility standard [I do not remember its code] and KDE, no.